1816 is known as the "year without a summer": A volcanic eruption in Indonesia had thrown large amounts of ash into the atmosphere, which first led to storms and then to crop failures, famine, and epidemics in Western Europe and North America. The English author Mary Shelley was vacationing with friends on Lake Geneva at the time, and because the group couldn't leave the house due to the weather, they passed the time with writing horror stories, which eventually became Shelley's novel Frankenstein. And this forms the basis for Florentina Holzinger's latest evening, premiered at the Berliner Volksbühne: a tale of human hubris, of the creation of an artificial being that turns out to be a monster.
As always, Holzinger doesn't tell the story chronologically, but circles around the monstrous ...
